The night of the festival, before the sake caught one-way rides in paper cup cars and the flames started dancing wildly in a black winter sky stretched taught over the mountains, the small village of Nozawa Onsen throbbed with energy and hiccupped fireworks. People wandered its narrow, winding alleyways in anxious packs like lost sports teams before a championship game and jockeyed for prime viewing positions in its main square. As I huddled and shivered with strangers at the base of a towering wooden shrine that is built every year so it may be burned down, I thought back to how my friends had described the dangers of last year’s festival:“It’s the most dangerous thing I have ever seen; nothing like it could ever take place in America! Every year people get seriously burned and injured before the night’s end.”
“Yep, sometimes people die. The flames are massive!”
“Make sure you stand up-wind so you don’t get burned from the ashes and the flames. Oh yeah, wear really old clothes just in case the winds change!
The festival, called the Dosojin Fire Festival, has been held every year since 1863 and is one of three fire festivals held annually in Japan. The villagers use the festival as a means of praying to the gods for a year of good fortune, health, and bountiful harvests. Before the festival, a massive shrine of beech wood is constructed by 100 villagers and dragged down from the mountains into the town square. Every year, villagers attempt to light the shrine on fire as 25-year-old male villagers, tied to the shrine by their wrists, defend the structure while 42-year-old local men watch the battle from atop the shrine.
The shrine was stunning. A huge mass of layered branches rested 20 feet above the ground atop the trunks of four large trees. The top thirty feet of three narrow beech trees rose out of the bundle of branches and made it seem as if the structure was not simply a shrine constructed by the hands of men, but an extraterrestrial microcosm, complete with living vegetation, that had fallen to Earth. Cherry-cheeked, gray-haired men guarded the shrine from their perches at the edge of the mass of branches and excited the crowd by chanting and dancing around with their sake glasses in hand. Men with wrinkle-free faces, men with fire in their eyes even before the first flames swirled in the town square that night, stood tied to the base of the shrine and acted like rowdy, eager sleigh dogs before the start of the Iditarod: donning rosy cheeks and alcohol-induced grins, they swayed and pulled on their tethers, cheering and shouting to the crowd and one another all the while.
After everyone had taken their places, after the crowd settled in and submitted their undivided attention to the moment, shirtless men assumed their positions before the shrine and began rhythmically pounding away on barrel-sized teiko drums. As excited whispers rippled through the crowd with the organ-rattling booms of the drums, the men tied to the shrine recognized the deep, slow, long-awaited Thump! Thump! Thump! of the drums and started screaming and yanking furiously on their tethers, knowing full well what type of pain was about to ensue. To protect them from the flames, the young men were quickly doused in water and sake. I couldn’t help but wonder if the men bound by their wrists wanted to be in this square, in this position, at this moment in time. Most failed in their attempts to mask their fear with stoic glances and aggressive cries.Responding to a heavily accented greeting of, “Herro! Herro!” I turned to my right to see a man in a dark blue jump suit and white hardhat standing next to me. At first I thought he was a policeman because he looked very official and was one of many similarly dressed men that slid slowly through the throng of people around me, but I suddenly noticed that he had a massive bottle of sake tied to his neck. I laughed at the Japan-ness of the man’s role in the festival, the way in which he politely forced people in the crowd to drink sake and loosen up, and he held out a small mug on a string for me to hold. He poured. I swigged. The cup swung back to its owner. The man patted me on my shoulder and slipped off into the sea of spectators.
The drums stopped, and as the crowd cheered and the men tied to the shrine yelped and pulled even harder on their chains of handmade rope, a pile of dried branches and twigs were set alight 30 yards in front of the shrine. Men emerged from the crowd carrying infants and toddlers. Young children ducked under the restraining ropes and ran toward the flames. Fathers holding infants walked slowly carrying small torches and, as if about to embark on a spelunking field trip with their young, made their way to the cavernous base of the shrine.
Flames waved dangerously close to the smiling faces of elementary school children and they ran back and forth to chase each other before the crowd. A foreigner next to me took note of my gaping jaw and unwavering gaze and warned, “This ain’t nothing, wait till they start the battle!” It all appeared and sounded so antiquated and dramatic.
When the children were cleared, the old men atop the shrine started throwing large bundles of dried sticks into the hands of an eager audience. Men lucky (or unlucky) enough to catch a bundle or two started running up the main path in front of the shrine to the pile of burning branches. Once their torches were lit, they yelled and charged toward the young men chained to the base of the shrine. Shooting fish in barrels is a great deal more difficult than charging at a swaying group of drunken, immobilized, young men. The men, some armed with tiny branches of freshly cut pine, tried to defend the shrine by putting their bodies between the flames and large tree trunks of the base of the shrine. Embers, accentuating every blow, every collision of fire and man, scattered and burst in clusters around the impact zone. Charging townspeople dove desperately toward the shrine only to fall and roll at the foot of the shrine’s defenders. The old men continued tossing bundles of sticks from above, the townspeople continued lighting them and charging.As I shivered and watched the men bolt toward the shrine with passion, something inside of me, something that resides in all people and makes the flicker of a fire’s flames so hypnotizing, begged me to run toward the flames, to charge and yell and dive into the cloud of smoke and embers. A second after I felt the urge and a few hours before I fully thought about the repercussions of my actions, I ducked under the restraining rope and got lost in the melee.
Men ran up and down the path around me, and, being taller than some of the other villagers, I had to duck to avoid being hit by the torches that all seemed to hover at my eye level. At first, the only dried sticks I could find were those that slipped lose and fell to the ground from the bundles of others. I gathered a handful and ran over to the bonfire. Men with soot-blackened faces squatted around me and plunged the tips of their bundles into the flames. When I had lit my sticks, I stood and started walking down the path toward the shrine. Men lining the edges of the crowd pushed me into the middle of a steady stream of running, fire-armed villagers and encouraged me to run. I charged the shrine and jabbed one of the tethered young men in his stomach with my torch. He doubled over. Embers flared up around my arm and face and the man swatted my torch to the ground with his one free arm. I did what any temporarily defeated attacker would do: I picked up my snuffed torch and ran back to relight it.
The cathartic waves of clear thinking that washed over the landscape of my mind in the midst of such blatant danger and chaos both baffled me and mesmerized me. Like the wild-eyed, blackened villagers around me, I could focus on nothing other than finding more torches to light and use in my assaults. Close calls made me run faster and pay more attention to my footing and my height; the feel of a big bundle of sticks in one hand made me yearn for a bundle of sticks in each hand. The more I ran and dove at the shrine’s defenders, the more I wanted to keep running and diving. The crowd seemed to disappear and my vision was confined to the smoke-and-flame-filled path in front of the shrine. Possessing two flaming torches and a pathetic command of the Japanese language, I tried to communicate with clusters of villagers so we could make coordinated charges. We tried to attack the young men in waves to increase our chances of pushing the tips of the flames of one or two of our torches up into that which taunted us: the shrine’s soft, vulnerable underbelly—the layers of straw and dried twigs that hung in matted clumps around its bottom rafters. With each pass, the young men seemed to grow bolder and more determined in their efforts to swat our flames into smoke.
I ran and charged until I was asked to stop. After running back and forth from shrine to fire for what seemed to be an eternity, one of the men in charge of holding the crowd away from the flames pulled on my shirt as I passed. He glared at me and drunkenly slurred, “Japanese only!” and pushed me up against the restraining rope. Jolted out of my adrenaline-fueled daze, I instantly became aware of my skin color, of the festival’s audience, of small burn marks that pocked my skin, of my labored breathing, and I quietly slipped under the rope and blended into the crowd. Someone clenched his arms around my waist to avoid being trampled by the shifting, tightly packed mass of people and I stared off into the blaze of the bonfire. The battle soon ended, the older men crawled down a thin ladder from their perch, and the shrine was set alight.
Standing in front of my bathroom mirror later that night, checking my blackened face and hands to rank my burns and blisters in order of severity, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d charged where I shouldn’t have charged, lit bundles of twigs that I shouldn’t have lit. The drunken man’s request echoed in my mind and I tried to figure out who was in the wrong. Was he being unjustly stubborn in trying to preserve the festival’s homogeneity? Or was I being intrusive and ignorant in my participation? Not a single torch-bearing villager seemed to mind that I was running by his side. Despite being a white man surrounded by Japanese men under the torchlight, I felt connected to them by way of our shared goal. I also felt as if my skin, normally shaded ‘Other’ here in Japan, was stripped of its uniqueness as the smoke was indiscriminate in its blackening. I feel like I now understand and respect the festival more than I would have had I simply stood deep within a crowd of people and observed it from afar.
I hope that when we travel, all of us try to scratch and penetrate the surfaces of the cultures we visit. Our gouges are usually reflective of both the amount of time we were able to spend in a country and the levels of societal and personal involvement we were able to achieve during our visits. The danger of simply “going on vacation” lies in the fact that many of the juicy, stereotype-shattering facets of a culture often hibernate below the shiny slick of constructed tourist experiences with which speed-vacationers anoint themselves. The difficult point to discern is an appropriate clashing point, a point that allows cultures to collide enough to let foreigners dig deep and burn indelible, tolerance-spawning memories into the hides of their minds while also permitting cultures to keep enough of a distance from one another to preserve the sanctity of the host culture’s traditions and values. A clash that is preceded by and followed with a deep bow, a clash that is more of a martial waltz than a blindfolded boxing bout, is sure to leave lifelearners with brains bloated with intrigue rather than fat bloody lips.
